Under the Gun: The Most Substantial Threat to US National Security by Henrik Schreiner

When I first found out that there was a mass shooting at an Elementary School about 20 miles away from where we live in Connecticut, I was shocked. Nevertheless, I do not remember this happening when I was 5 in 2012, I remember hearing people talking about how something bad happened that day. At the time my 5-year-old brain could not fully understand what was going on, but rediscovering what happened years later came as a disturbing revelation. I had always heard of mass shootings and thought they were this fantasy thing that did not happen where we lived, but when I found out about the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown it put into perspective that no matter how safe any area is in the United States, we are not safe from guns with the current firearm regulations. The Sandy Hook shooting and other events like this helped to show the scale of gun violence to me and helped me conclude that stricter gun control laws, utilizing background checks with bans on high-capacity magazines and military caliber firearms, would make the United States safer, and lower the total amount of gun deaths.

The Sandy Hook shooting may have had a great impact on my beliefs, and possibly 16 students I surveyed in a Language Arts classroom at Coleytown Middle School in Westport, CT, 81.3% believing that stricter gun laws should be enacted in the US. This could implicate the majority of the population would be in favor of more gun control laws, and there would be little outrage, with general pleasure about the laws that were agreed upon and set in place. One of the students surveyed, Eddie van der Merwe, explained to me in an interview that guns are designed to harm and attack another human being, and no matter who has it, that is the gun’s purpose. Having the volume of guns the United States has, is bound to provoke violence and homicide, causing many deaths and the loss of many Americans.

Though the majority of students believe that stricter gun control laws should be enacted, this also translates onto the national scale. A ProCon text demonstrates this theory by explaining that in a 2018 Quinnipiac Poll, researchers found that 97% of American voters and 97% of gun owners support universal background checks, proving that the majority of gun owners support background checks, proving that having stricter gun control would help the public and would not spark much backlash or outrage.

Gun control laws will also significantly help reduce gun deaths. This is proven to work as in an article written by Matthew Green, detailing that in Australia 1996 there was a mass shooting that killed 35 people, and after this the government imposed stricter gun control laws, and there has not been another mass shooting there since and a drop in the firearm mortality rate. Australia has proven that implementing gun control laws can reduce gun deaths, so why shouldn’t we follow the same steps in the US? I think we would all feel safer knowing that there was a much lower chance of someone walking into any public place and unleashing mass destruction and murder, taking innocent lives.

Be that as it may, people that dispute my side of the argument might say that guns are primarily used for protection from potential danger, this is mostly incorrect. ProCon explains none of the 62 mass shootings between 1982 and 2012 was stopped by an armed civilian. This implies that armed citizens do not often stop shootings and can escalate the situation into something worse than it already was. This also exemplifies how stricter gun control laws could be very useful, because they could help to prevent people with evil-intent from having guns and then in turn reduce the number of mass shootings, crimes, and innocent lives lost. They also say that “regulations of an individual’s right to arms restrict liberty” (Charles). The second amendment dictates that militias may bear arms to ensure the security of a free state, not allowing every person to have the inalienable right to own a gun. By banning gun accessories, instituting universal background checks, and military-grade weapons, no one’s civil liberties would be encroached on.

So now that we have established having stricter gun control laws would reduce the number of mass shootings and deaths, we need to start implementing and administering stricter gun control laws so that we can reduce the number of firearm deaths, and make the United States a more safe and peaceful place for everyone to live in.

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